Synge and the Early Days of the Abbey

Abstract

Maire O’Neill, she for whom John Millington Synge wrote specially his greatest plays, ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ and ‘Deirdre of the Sorrows,’ is in her fifties now, but when I met her recently I found that her voice is still as fresh, velvety and musical as when first she crossed the footlights of the Abbey in the exciting springtime of Yeats, Lady Gregory, the Fay Brothers and Synge himself. It was a brave group of young men and women—none of them older than twenty-five and none of them trained in the art of the theatre, but all of them united with one burning ambition—to have their own literary playhouse.